Common Mistakes

Here are some common mistakes made before the flop:

• the #1, playing too many hands;
• paying too much with a speculative hand;
• calling raises with inadequate value;
• neglecting position;
• failing to take your opponents’ style into consideration;
• completing the small blind with too many hands;
• not raising enough with your good hands;
• never stealing;

Make sure to watch the previous points, you will avoid some common leaks and ease up your life on the later streets.

More Hands, Same Profit

Actually, as you gain experience and as your game improves, you will be able to play more hands than these standards suggest. Some professional players seem to play a lot of hands with profit. Yet, with a Limit structure, the vast majority of their profit comes invariably from the best hands we mentionned above. Aces and kings will win you more money than anything else. Therefore, it is all right to concentrate on you main source of revenue, and steer clear of trouble hands that could be marginally profitable. Some pros do just that. Yes, we said just before that some pros play many hands: in fact, Mike Caro says that one pro can play as much as twice as many hands as another pro, and both can make the same profit. And that supposes that they don’t make many mistakes with the extra hands (which we are liable to do).

Imagine your are some famous actor. You are shooting some movie, and there comes some dangerous action scene. Naturally, a team of professional stunt men are here. But you think it might be fun to do it yourself, since you are still in pretty good shape. Everybody tries to talk you out of it, but to no avail. Eventually, the person in charge says: “ok, do it if you want, but if you have to go to hospital and the shooting is delayed, you will have to pay for that from your own pocket”. If you do it successfully, you will get the paycheck the stunt man would have had; but it is much lower than what you usually earn.

That’s a somewhat similar proposition to playing many hands at Limit Holdem. Yes, you will have more fun, and yes, you will win a bit more, but the risks are darn real. If you are experienced in those action scenes, then the risks are not that great, even though the extra profit is not big either. But it you are inexperienced, you will end up with broken wrists, twisted ankles and other various stitches - and you will have to pay for that.

Being able to accurately judge his own skills is essential here, and that’s precisely what many players are not good at: they believe they are much stronger than they are. This is natural, and if it were not the case, very few people would play poker. The bottom line could be: be smart, and don’t let ego or the perspective of having more fun distract you from your winning strategy.

Related Items:

• Betting Structures
• Hand Dynamics
• Starting Hands for No Limit Holdem
• The Betting